


And the Snow Continued to Fall

by neekssunshine



Category: A Plague Tale: Innocence (Video Game)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/F, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Set During Canon, during that period of time when Hugo got kidnapped, everyone loves and cares about each other, found family troupe really showin through in this one gang, her brother is missing being gay isn’t on the front of the mind rn, not explicitly romance but it’s evidently there for sure, not so much fluff, so this is very much Not That, stories about getting together during grief makes me uncomfortable, symptoms of grief and loss of loved ones, they don’t really kiss or anything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-24
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:48:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23824087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neekssunshine/pseuds/neekssunshine
Summary: “Never before has Amicia felt so lonely. Hugo was nowhere to be found and there are only so many hours in the day that she and the other kids could search before her body felt heavy enough to collapse. It has been two weeks since he ran off due to Amicia being a fool.”Hugo runs off and Melie tries to comfort Amicia as best as she knows how.
Relationships: Melie & Amicia de Rune, Melie/Amicia de Rune
Kudos: 31





	And the Snow Continued to Fall

Never before has Amicia felt so lonely. Hugo was nowhere to be found and there are only so many hours in the day that she and the other kids could search before her body felt heavy enough to collapse. It has been two weeks since he ran off due to Amicia being a fool.

Even with all the clinks and clatter from the forge, down from the middle floor in what might as well be Lucas’s room now, and the twins being up to no good, the Château is unbearably quiet without the boy.

And so every night, when all the torches are lit and everyone else seems to be asleep, Amicia goes down to the tomb on the lowest floor to pray. She pleads and bargains with saints and God himself to keep Hugo safe. She clasps her hands together so tight, were she in the right mind, she might have felt as if they’d break. She lights a candle each time. She drives herself to tears.

“Please,” she cries one night. “Please bring him back to us. Watch over him, at the very least.” She repeats this request often.

She cries louder than she has before, but she doesn’t care enough to notice. There was a shuffle on the stairs, but she is too encompassed in her prayer to hear.

The morning comes too quickly after she shut her eyes. Amicia’s body feels weary, as it almost always does now. However, the sad attempt to muffle laughter coming from the floor below is definitely a sound to boost her morale. 

Amicia sits up slow, as if not to wake an adjacent fellow. She rubs crust from her eyes and glances over to the mat snuggled up right next to hers. Every morning, she half expects him to be there.

When she finally stands and enters the staircase, it seems that each step down the stone stairs is easier than the last. Laughter erupts when she’s halfway down, and then many drawn-out shushes.

“What’s going on down here then,” she allows her face to rise and places her hands to rest atop her belt. She feels it peel away from the skin with a sticky-hot pain, as she had once again forgotten to remove the belt before bed. Her smile doesn’t falter.

“I told you that we were being too loud!” Rodric shouts, no longer attempting to stay quiet. 

While the others seem to argue amongst themselves, Amicia looks down at the floor in the middle of a circle the kids have formed. There rests jacks made from sheep bone, the ones she had found in the English camp.

“Amicia! Tell Melie she’s cheating!” says Arthur, sitting back and crossing his arms. He doesn’t look angry, but he does seem to be trying to.

Melie throws her hands into the air. She isn’t wearing her usual gloves, Amicia notices. “How can you cheat at jacks? You’ve been keeping my score!”

“The pieces have been tampered with!”

“The same pieces everyone else has been using?”

“It’s one of your tricks!”

“Melie, stop cheating,” Amicia concludes, and everyone has a difficult time trying to stop smiling.

Melie tries to develop a very serious look. She is not very successful. “Come play with us, I’ll show you I’m not.”

Amicia is reluctant to join the others, but she knows that it will help improve her mood. 

“Oh, alright,” she agrees.

A few rounds is all it takes for Amicia to forget about everything as she’s swallowed up into the moment and into the silly little game. If even for just an hour or so, it’s just what she needed. She knows that later she might curse herself for not being productive instead, but right now, she will let herself be a child. She might not get the chance to relax like this again.

She does notice, however, that Melie does have quite a few more wins over everyone else and that after Melie’s turn, before giving the jacks to the person next to her, a bone slips up into her sleeve. Melie winks at Amicia when she notices. Amicia smiles in response.

The rest of the group notices only after Lucas points out that the numbers Melie is getting were highly improbable with the amount of jacks they have. Melie doesn’t try to deny it.

“I was just trying to see when you’d catch on is all.”

After Melie reveals her trick and Arthur says something smug about catching on first, the group disperses as Lucas insists he must get back to his work. He’s “on the brink of something great.” He’s been “on the brink of something great” for a few days now.

Rodric claps a heavy hand onto Amicia’s shoulder when they enter the main chamber and sports a kind-eyed expression. “Have you eaten yet? I cut up some fruit earlier. It’s over there, on the tables.”

“I haven’t, thank you.”

This morning, the apples taste especially sour.

Amicia quickly finds that there’s not much else for her to do around the castle, as she finished refining her outfit for the height of winter a few days ago. All the laundry was washed yesterday and had already been set out to dry. So, she suggests to the others that maybe they should expand the search area for Hugo a bit. She asks if anyone would like to come with her right now to look, and the only ones not busy seemed to be the twins. The other boys agree to look in the morning.

By the time they make it outside the Château grounds and into the forest, their cheeks and ears seem to almost glow red from the cold. The twins don’t appear to mind. Amicia doesn’t care.

Traditionally, Amicia’s first action is to sit and listen for a few moments, but all that’s ever done before is get her hopes up when a boar moves around the brush. So this time, she doesn’t sit and listen, but walks quickly to the end of the last search area.

Arthur climbs to the treetops when they get closer to the edge of the last search zone, and the girls stay on the ground.

“I’ll go east, you go west, huh?” Melie suggests, and Amicia has no reason to not agree.

Amicia calls Hugo’s name, and she hears Melie do the same a little ways away. She scans every bit of the new area- into every alcove, every nook, and every space that might look like some kind of hiding hole. She doesn’t find a single thing. Usually, she’ll find materials to use or flowers or gifts for the other kids, but today, she finds nothing. The winter must’ve taken everything away in its gusts.

But then, Amicia hears a small, light rustling in a bush just to her right. There’s no hoarse oinks of a boar and she can’t see any other animal. What she does see is something brownish red, the color that Hugo’s scarf would be under the dark canopy of the trees. It looks to be either inside or just behind the bush.

She steps closer and leaves crush beneath her foot. She thinks she sees the object move.

Her heartbeat accelerates and she’s breathing heavier than she’d like to be. What if it really is his scarf? It could mean he’s been here. It could mean he was murdered here. She almost doesn’t want to look; she’s almost too scared to.

As she moves closer she tries her best to step on anything but the leaves, and she does well. She makes almost no noise moving across damp spots and rocks as she gets within a body’s length of the bush.

‘This is it!’ she thinks. ‘This could be the clue pointing us in the right direction! I could find him near here!’ She hasn’t felt as hopeful for a few days now. The feeling is almost overwhelming.

Alas, her heart was too loud in her ears and too tight in her chest for her to control the volume of her footsteps any longer. A twig snaps, and a family of hares run out of a small depression in the ground. This startles Amicia, and she trips on her own feet trying to move back. The mother must’ve been standing just on the outside of the depression.

Amicia’s breath escapes her- her heart sinks so deep into her chest that she feels like she is seconds away from throwing up. How could she have let her get her hopes up like this? Her tears are immediate but slow.

She feels like a child. She convinced herself of something that wasn’t even plausible, something that she knew logically could not be. She is a fool.

Her tears come more quickly now and have formed a constant stream on her face, but she doesn’t care enough to notice. There is a shuffle in the leaves behind her, but her cries are too loud for her to hear.

“Amicia…” Melie trails off, and Amicia then whips her head around to look at Melie. She’s covered in dirt and scratches on the sleeves of her shirt, presumably from branches and twigs being caught on them. Her snow skin seems more pale around the bright red areas of her face. She comes closer, revealing blue bloodshot eyes Amicia hadn’t noticed before. They’re not from crying, as her eyes aren’t glossy enough. She must’ve not slept well.

“I thought I’d found him.” Amicia tries to whisper in between sobs, but her voice keeps getting caught in her throat, forcing her to stutter and speak louder than she anticipated. She can feel the edges of her mouth dip down without her permission and imagines that she looks ridiculous. “Or that I’d found his scarf, at least.” She coughs, trying to clear the mucus from her throat. She feels as if she’s never taken a breath before. “I was stupid,” she croaks.

Amicia decides she can’t look at Melie’s pitiful expression anymore and digs a hole into her hands with her face. She hears the crunching of leaves and Melie kneels next to her.

A light snow has begun to fall, Amicia can feel it on her skin. Maybe it has been falling for awhile. She isn’t paying it enough attention to know, but sometime later, she’ll allow herself to bask in it. Not now. Not after this loss.

It sounds as if Melie opens her mouth and inhales to say something, but she doesn’t. Instead, she leans forward and encloses Amicia within her arms, almost as if shielding her from the world. Amicia cries harder, but clings onto Melie’s arm for dear life.

Amicia has no idea how long they stay there on the forest floor with Melie gently stroking Amicia’s brown hair. No more words are exchanged then and the passage of time is irrelevant to them. To Amicia, at least.

“I’m so sorry about all this,” whispers Melie when Amicia’s sobs dampen to whimpers. She continues to caress Amicia’s pale arms with her own pale hands, and then Amicia’s hands with her fingers. The touch is welcome. It’s caring, and Amicia knows it’s done with an altruistic intent- out of the goodness of her heart.

“I’m so sorry I got your clothes wet,” Amicia says when she moves her head back a touch to see the tears and snot she’s applied to Melie’s clothes. They both breathe a small laugh.

“It’s not a problem. It’ll just clean off, yeah? Nothing to worry about.”

Silence again, then a dance in the semi-distant tree tops, and then a figure running across the leaf-littered ground. Amicia registers it as Arthur, and gently yet swiftly removes herself from Melie’s embrace. It seems colder out than when they left the castle.

“I’m sorry, I thought you must've been hurt Amicia.” Arthur shifts his weight, looking increasingly awkward. “Am I interrupting something?”

“No, no,” Amicia answers when Melie stays quiet. She takes a large breath, returns Arthur’s understanding expression, and stands to shake the leaves from her clothing. “It’s nothing. Let’s head back, it’ll be dark soon. Shall we?” Amicia offers Melie a hand, but Melie just waves it off politely as she stands. 

“No thank you,” she then says rudely. It doesn’t bother Amicia, she knows by now the rude tone of Melie’s voice is just how it is sometimes.

“Last one back to the Château is a sack of rotten apples!” Arthur shouts as he takes off towards their castle. 

“Oh come on! That’s hardly fair!” Melie takes off after him.

Well Amicia doesn’t want to be a sack of rotten apples now, does she? So she starts to run. She runs until she passes Arthur- who was very disgruntled at how quickly she and Melie caught up- and until she barely beats Melie to the end of the bridge. Everyone has lost their breath to the wind, with thick clouds streaming out of their mouths like dragons. The cold air stings the inside of Amicia’s throat. 

“Aw Arthur! I guess,” Melie breathes in deeply. “I guess you’re a sack of rotten apples.”

“Shut up, Melie. Let’s just go inside. We’ll get sick if we’re out in the snow any longer.”

When they enter the walls, Amicia can’t help but notice all the braziers are lit and in place. The fire’s heat is more than a welcome feeling unto the children’s skin.

Lucas waves at them from across the courtyard. They wave back.

“Lucas, you didn’t push all these braziers yourself did you?” Amicia says after she and the twins cross over to meet him.

“No, Rodric helped,” Lucas deepened his voice into what Amicia could only assume was an impression of Rodric. “‘You do the alchemy, I’ll do the pushing,’ he said.”

“Thanks for the help and all, but are we going to go inside or stay out here and freeze to death?” Melie says, slightly hunched over and clutching herself in a hug.

The large door to the living quarters is pushed open and a savory smell fills Amicia’s senses. Boar, she identifies. It reminds her of her father somehow. She sees the dining room of her house, before the rats came. Just her father and she, two other places set for two empty chairs. “Just in case the mistress and the young lord decide to come down,” the servants in the kitchen would say. Amicia sees now that maybe they just hoped her mother and brother would come down if they made a place for them. Amicia now sees that she almost had felt the same. Her chest squeezes itself a little.

“Ah welcome home, friends!” Rodric booms from over by the fire. “I started the stew while you were gone, should be done here soon enough. Settle in! Get warm!” He points at the blankets they all had made from fabric found around the castle. “You’d best put some dryer clothes on as well, huh?”

And so they did. Then they settle in, huddled together for dinner, not bothering to move to the table, and careful not to make a mess onto their clean clothes or bedding.

Amicia hopes that wherever Hugo and her mother are, they’re just as warm as she is now.

Melie touches Amicia’s hand while the boys chat to themselves, as if she had known where Amicia’s thoughts were going.

She doesn’t say anything to calm her, but she looks into Amicia’s eyes, offers a sad smile, and squeezes her hand. And somehow, for even just that moment, it’s enough.

Sleep comes swiftly for Arthur and Rodric, with their warm bellies and blankets. Amicia knows that Lucas is in his lab but she can’t seem to figure where Melie went off to. She didn’t see her leave, but Amicia guesses that’s because it’s Melie’s specialty to be sneaky.

She tip-toes down the stairs, but stops when she sees Lucas almost pulling his hair out. Even though Amicia made him promise not to stay up all night, she knows he plans to.

“Hey Lucas?”

“Yes, what is it?” He asks almost rudely before he can stop himself. His eyes widen and he looks away quickly. “I’m sorry, I’m just…” He shakes his head firmly as if wiping away a thought. “I’m just frustrated, you see…”

“I bet whatever you’re working on would come to you easier if you went to sleep.”

“Yes, yes. I suppose you’re right.” He inhales, then furrows his brows, and looks back to Amicia. “You’re still awake?”

Lucas came down to the tomb to check on Amicia one night when she was there praying, as he was awake and Amicia hadn’t noticed him at first. He apologized for intruding shortly thereafter, noticing just how personal Amicia’s nightly prayer was. He knows she does it, so when she gives him a shrug and points down the stairs, he seems to understand.

“Oh, I see. Well then, don’t mind me.” He starts to walk over to her. “I’ll go upstairs to get some sleep.” He places a hand on her shoulder just before he passes her and looks into her eyes. He lingers, and Amicia senses a deep understanding. He squeezes her shoulder lightly. Maybe he doesn’t know what to say, maybe he doesn’t want to say anything, but Amicia knows what he means. The two of them have grown closer like that since Hugo has gone. They share something children as young as they shouldn’t have to- the loss of a loved one. Seconds pass, then Lucas turns and waddles up the stairs.

Amicia watches him go, just to make sure he does actually go to bed, then quickly heads down the stairs and makes her way over to the tomb. Just as she reaches the entryway, she catches a glimpse of red hair to her right on the front bench. Amicia notices that it glitters in the candlelight.

“It’s cold down here tonight, huh?” Melie says, turning her head slightly in Amicia’s direction. “It’s never quite this cold in the mornings.”

“I didn’t know you’d be down here, I’m sorry if I interrupted you.” Amicia doesn’t know what to do with her hands so she leaves them at her sides. She feels incredibly stiff, like a statue in a chapel. She realizes too late that she didn’t respond to Melie’s question.

“Oh no, don’t worry too much about it.”

Amicia forces herself to walk over and around to Melie, as she isn’t looking her in her eyes when she should be. They are having a conversation after all. But just then, firelight catches something else. A small, white, cube-ish figure dancing across Melie’s knuckles. A sheep’s ankle bone. 

“Those were for him, you know,” Amicia says, sitting down. Melie doesn’t look up. “For Hugo.”

“I know, I was there when you took them. In the camp. I hope you didn’t mind us using them.” Amicia can’t tell Melie’s tone, as it’s somewhat a mixture of amusement and concern. Amicia knows that's just what Melie sounds like, but it doesn’t ease her anxiety.

“No of course not, I bet Hugo would want us to, until he gets back.” Amicia smiles a little and it leaks into her voice. It comes out sad, but hopeful.

Melie stops rolling the bone and clutches it in her fist. She pauses, parts her lips ever so slightly, and turns her head in Amicia’s direction. She still isn’t looking at her. It seems like she’s thinking of what to say.

“I miss him,” she says, finally. “Had I spent less time with him I don’t think I would have cared this much, but after seeing you today, I-“ She swallows. There’s so many things that could be going through her head right now and Amicia doesn’t even have time to think about it before Melie starts again. “I felt as if somehow, you released feelings in my stead that I didn’t know I had yet.”

Amicia has no idea what she means, but she nods anyway.

“Sort of silly, huh? I know Arthur feels the same, but he’ll never say it, the stubborn bastard.”

Melie finally looks into Amicia’s eyes and smiles. Blue eyes, bloodshot. Glossy.

Something about Melie’s presence in the tomb with Amicia makes her not want to be alone right now. Something within her asks for Melie to stay. Maybe because she’s the only other girl in the castle. Maybe because of the moment they shared earlier in the forest. Maybe because of how much she sees her own sorrow in Melie’s eyes. It doesn’t matter. 

This night, they pray for Hugo together. This night, the snow falls hard onto their little isolated castle. This night, the Château feels a little more like it did before Hugo disappeared.

It feels a little more like home.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading; this was my first published fic ever! Let me know what you think and what could be improved in the comments.


End file.
